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Backstory:
The reigning champions, the Oldest Team in the Book, Belmondo’s Team, the Transcendants, the Rising Suns. All these and more are titles that have been bestowed upon AG-Systems, the second most successful team in AntiGravity racing with seven championships under their belt, the most recent added in the FX400 league. Much like FEISAR, it seems that after their shaky start to AntiGravity racing, they have finally managed to find a driving force that has sent them right to the start of the field. Some say it’s a lead pilot and a development team that finally work hand in hand instead of one having to deal with the other, some say it’s a decent budget at long last. Whatever it was, the black and yellow squads that first called themselves the team of the Father of AG-Racing are now at the head of the pack in red, white and cyan.

AG-Systems was initially set up to be the commercial arm of FEISAR in its’ youthful form as FEAR, Pierre Belmondo wanting to keep a truthful monopoly on the technology in case it fell into the wrong hands who wanted to use it for greed, or worse, for military applications. One saving grace for the Frenchman was an approach from the fledgling Japanese consortium that had decided to leap onto the use of AG-Technology quickly. ‘Forever Floating’ as the consortium translated into English had already begun constructing lifts using Belmondo’s technology to reach the gigantic skyscrapers that Japan had slowly begun to develop. Over teppanyaki at the consortium leader’s home in a Kyoto penthouse, Pierre saw the potential for his company to become what he wanted it to be, away from the constant intrigues of Europe.

AG-Systems moved to Kyoto within the year, though some of its’ members were lured back to FEISAR by the promise of better pay. This arguably left some of the more ‘pure’ members with AG-S, those that treasured either the freedom to develop limitlessly, or to work truly for the name of purity rather than money. For about three years, Belmondo operated AG-S with his two most trusted advisors, Holst McQueen as head of technology and Delia Flaubert as head of design.

Unfortunately, the two began butting heads as soon as their quarterly bills came through and Holst started pressurising for more work to be done on refining the current AG-devices rather than spending money on creating brand new things. Flaubert got behind her mentor until the Canadian and the Frenchwoman were roaring at each other across the table at volume enough to knock over the vases of flowers on the table. It was after this happened once too often that Belmondo declared that enough was enough, and the two had to leave the company. His sympathies went with Flaubert, but he didn’t want to create a rival team to AG-Systems filled with malice from only firing McQueen. Instead, by sending them both away, he created Qirex and Auricom and kept AG-Systems out of the years of warring between those two.

In the early F3600 and F5000 leagues, AG-Systems and their pilots were plagued with difficulties between the two, for AG-S would never allow a single design to be used more than twice, forever changing the setup of the craft or making new adjustments to make it faster and handle better. Despite the appreciation most pilots showed for such a dedicated engineering team, it was at the cost of any sort of consistency and it needed extraordinarily skilled pilots to keep up with the constant development, which ironically was denied to AG-Systems. After all, the best pilots knew they wanted a position at either Auricom or Qirex. It was the most spiritual and purist pilots who came to Belmondo’s old team for a job, and though this kept the Japanese squad very happy, their only championship in those first years came from Mitsoto Gato in the Venom F5000 leagues. It took a different tactic to approach the hotly contested F7200 league.

The man for the job was Katsuogo Muro, a graduate from FEISAR study who moved to the Japanese squad half from pressure from his own public and half because of his long-time adoration for the Rising Suns, as they were known in their home country. Taking both Vector and a Venom championship in the F7200 league, Katsugo wowed the crowds and was a much adored pilot, even by Qirex and FEISAR who had historically been the most wary of AG-Systems in the past. There was global shock and a great ceremony in Japan after he fell to his death when taking part in an ‘extreme sports’ challenge on Japanese Datacast. Without their most skilled of pilots, AG-Systems was in disarray and from then on never stood on the podium, the technologically advanced ships at least able to keep the Piranha and Assegai teams away at first before their money woes began to catch up with them. The constant development had eaten away at the team’s funds and now that Pierre Belmondo was dead as well there was no central, influential figure to rally the troops and convince investors to pay up.

Much like Qirex, the Japanese-based squad were forced to look for a new buyer and also like Qirex, they ended up taking the wrong peoples’ money. Nobody is quite sure who set up or where G-Tech was founded, but as investigations after the end of the riots caused by the fall of the F9000 league, many members were from Overtel and Tigron to perpetrate their idea of a hyper-violent league purely to create datacast ratings. G-Tech ships were slow, pathetically shielded, and had no handling whatsoever, but some pilots just had no choice but to fly for them and cough up sums to fly each month, all of which went straight into the pockets of the corrupt businessmen who owned them. The only person who seemed to like G-Tech at all was Englishwoman Naomi Turner, who was so determined to keep racing that she didn’t care where she had to do it or what magazines she had to pose for to keep her seat.

Given that the G-Tech crew were ‘sleepers’ so to speak, it was believed that they would escape the fall of the F9000 league and be able to retire, but a drive by loyal and honest lawyers found each and every one of them and forced them to pay up the damages they’d caused to the sport. It was an impossible sum, but there was nobody else to blame after the members of Overtel and Tigron were all dead. Most members of G-Tech lived out the rest of their life in a penal camp on Mars, and not one is still alive.

The AG-Systems name took a while to resurface, but the idea came about with two graduates from the University of Kyoto discussing what they wanted to do for their final year dissertation. With underground AG-Ship racing all the rage at this point in time, they decided to create a new ship and race it under the ‘Forever Floating’ tag. The ship was of course red, white, and cyan and the two engineers soon found a couple of eager pilots to fly for them. Sakura Tanaku and Inatu Itsua soon became well known amongst the underground AG-community as a hard-working, intelligent and creative couple who held Pierre Belmondo and many of the great names of before as inspiration. The couple were engaged shortly after achieving excellent marks in their dissertation, but they have been unable to marry, forever focussing on their newly formed AG-Systems team. The money that they had intended to be for their wedding went to buying and restoring the old AG-Systems buildings in Kyoto. They invited most of their friends from the underground leagues to join them and so AG-Systems was reborn once more, to the delight of many AG enthusiasts. It was perhaps this rebirth of one of the classic teams that caused the AG Race Commission to announce the new FX150 league, with AG-Systems given automatic entry.

Tanaku and Itsua were somewhat overwhelmed by the proposal but soon got to work – Tanaku made herself Team Principal as Itsua took care of the design and construction of the ship. With a team of eager young enthusiasts, they lacked the knowledge and experience that Auricom, FEISAR and even Assegai had, but they made up for it with good hard work. Their first breakthrough came with a sponsorship deal with the popular ‘Joy Noodle Bar’ chain in Japan that also settles their catering needs. Even today, Joy Bars in Japan and across the world will offer ‘AG-Systems Special’, which consists of leek, lamb and garlic.

Their pilot lineup was somewhat poor at first – part of the Joy deal meant that they needed to use a pilot picked by the noodle company, which neither of the team heads was happy about. But Hitomi flew for the team in the first three leagues under the new ‘FX’ setup. It wasn’t until they got their dream boy in Calursoso that the squad has truly come into its’ own, and the results speak for themselves. Constructors’ and Pilots’ championships in FX250 and 400, most perfect laps in all leagues, three times top of the ‘preferred team’ public votes and best livery for Croshaw’s cyan ship. Now coming into the FX500 league on a high, it’s doubtful if anyone can stop Belmondo’s legacy from eclipsing Qirex as the most successful team in the history of the sport.

However, not all is rosy. While in the past the only enemy AG-Systems ever had was money worries, the new teams in the newer leagues have brought new and worrying challenges to the more pacifist of teams. After Triakis entered and began bothering Auricom for wins, it looked as though the Americans were going to go to war with the Australians once more, but Auricom has been nothing if not predictable, and when Qirex rejoined the championship they got the stars and stripes pointing at them with all barrels on auto. This left Triakis to duel with AG-Systems for the leftover places, and slowly a bitter anger came from this constant abrasion. Victory in the FX250 league was only a hair’s breadth between the two ships at times and all pilots and team members felt the strain. FX300 pushed this even further, though Triakis emerged victorious in the end.

Before this, the teams had fought hard but had always managed to congratulate each other in the style of exhausted and firm rivals who respect each other, but when Triakis’ Reverse-Inertia Decelleration System was found to be illegal and they were exempt, both teams were shaken. Triakis was furious that they had been denied their legal victorious rights, and AG-Systems were also shocked that their honourable rivals had been so dismissed by the courts. To this day, AG-Systems and Thierry Caluroso officially disregard the inherited victory in the FX300 league from Triakis, but the Australian military squad are still bitter and hyper-aggressive when they can be. It doesn’t help that AG-Systems have made a firm rival out of Harimau International as well after some close scrapes from FX300-400.

WM: Vince? I know you’re alive, I can see your vital signs. Can you hear? Can you move? I can’t see any broken bones…

VS: For the love of God, you t**t, of course I can hear you. If anything’s going to survive a holocaust, it’s one of these.

WM: How are you feeling?

VS: I’m s**ding p***ed off, what the f*** did you expect?

WM: *laughs* Same as always, huh?

VS: *dry chuckle* I guess you could say that. Don’t put me back onto the wall again for a while, will you?

WM: No worries Vince. I know you prefer to be alone with your thoughts for a bit.

VS: My thoughts and Nelson maybe. Who got me?

WM: *sigh* Samirsdøttir, of Qirex.

VS: Cheers. I appreciate you doing this for me.

WM: You’re an old drinking buddy of mine, Vince. We grew up together. Rules and regs are meant to be broken for people like you.

VS: I grew up with a lot of people. Doesn’t mean they bend the rules for me all the time.

WM: I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, I had no say in the dealings. I may be your friend, but I wasn’t willing to sabotage my job here. Neither was Thierry.

VS: The frog was in it?

WM: *long pause* S***. I guess it’s out now. Thierry tried to lodge a private appeal for Triakis to be re-instated. He was told he would have his pilot’s licence revoked if he didn’t.

VS: What the hell was Caluroso trying to get out of letting us back in? Deny himself a championship?

WM: AG-Systems took it badly, Vince. I know you cut off contact, and you don’t like hearing, but nobody on that team wants that victory. As far as they’re concerned, Triakis won fair and square, and Caluroso believes that as well. He wants you to start talking to him again Vince.

VS: I don’t believe that for a second. What sort of team wants to throw away a world championship?

WM: Whatever you may think man, it’s true. Anyway, my mouth is running away again. I’ve said too much, Vince. You give this a long, hard think. Switching you back to the wall.

Ship Details:
The imaginatively named AGS-500 suffers from something of a lack of development time. Much like the major players of the previous leagues (FEISAR, Icaras and arguably Harimau), the constant tweaking of the AGS-400 to win them the FX400 league has left them with little time to test and develop a brand new ship. Much like the two European squads, it seems that the Japanese squad has enlarged the older ship to the new specifications and kept most of the shape of the ship fairly similar. Differences to the old ship are more than just cosmetic though.

AG-S has abandoned the air-cooled system from the previous years after reliability issues at low speeds meant they lost a lot of ground to other craft in the early leagues. Instead of the rotating propellers at the back to help force air through the back part of the ship, it now uses a circulating coolant system similar to that in the Piranha craft, though with less distance to travel, it doesn’t take up as much power as the Brazilian solution.

In addition, deciding to abandon the fight for maximum top speed, it appears that AG-Systems has turned its’ attention to the maximum output from the thrusters. This was never an issue with the old craft, but now it seems that there is at the very least another three GigaNewtons of thrust coming out of the back of the ship, meaning that of the entire grid, only the Goteki 45 can get off the line faster. Inatu Itsua and Jason Croshaw have both said they look forward to an AG-S vs Goteki 1v1 race to settle the matter for once and for all. So far, Goteki has declined the offers.

Lead Pilot – Thierry Caluroso ()
There is a common saying amongst AG-Pilots the world around that if you want first places, you need a Frenchman. It was Pierre Belmondo that pioneered AntiGravity technology to begin with, and Sofia De La Rente that set the record for the longest and highest solo AG-flight in the world. Many years later, Belmondo’s great-great-granddaughter, Natasha Belmondo, took the world by storm as an Auricom pilot and then as a Xios champion all the way to the bitter end of the F9000 series. Throughout the history of the sport there have been other less well known names who still provide close and nail-biting racing, and unlike some teams who limit where their pilots come from, the door is open across the world to a Frenchman.

This legacy’s Gaul of the moment is a young man from Bordeaux who began his life right beside a popular holiday destination’s AG-karting track and spent a lot of his young life learning the art of flinging one of the small, metre-square devices around the track best he could. It didn’t take long for a couple of eyes to catch the skilled young Frenchman and he was offered a place at FEISAR Study. A regular sight as a reserve pilot at race weekends, the young man often impressed in practice sessions but was always sidelined for the more popular Italian in the team. He became close friends with a lot of the paddock during this period, most notably Vincent Stephenson of Triakis whenever he came to the tracks for testing purposes. His patience with FEISAR only lasted for a short while though before he set out to find a place to fly at the same time as his friend after Triakis confirmed an entry.

Caluroso found a place at AG-Systems as the team was undergoing some experimentation. They had run in the first two seasons with Croshaw and Hitomi, the former a great development driver but not a race winner, and the latter almost purely there for the sponsorship deals. Deciding to take a risk, the couple running AG-Systems gave Caluroso the main pilot’s seat, and let Croshaw take over Hitomi’s ship in Friday running for practice sessions for ship development. The Japanese pilot would race as second pilot, and keep the crowd’s attention as well as the money of the sponsors. Tanaku and Itsua took a big risk, but it paid off.

Thierry took to the lighter AG-Systems with more powerful engines like a duck to water and began to astonish everyone with his laptimes, not to mention the barrel rolls he could pull out. He claimed his skill came down to a friendly rivalry with his friend Stephenson in Triakis, though as the season went on and the weapons and close weapons began to put stress on the two pilots, the relationship between the pair of them became unbearably tense. This came to a head halfway through the FX250 season when the two pilots had a shouting match on the podium much to the surprise of Nyoko Kassan, who was trying to enjoy his first ever win for Assegai Developments in a Flash race.

However, it seemed the relationship was shortly patched over a week later when the two turned up on a beach in north-eastern Makana covered in bottles of beer, wine and a couple of scantily clad women. The tabloids of course had a field day with it, and both teams had a hard time trying to cover up the problem with reserve pilots – Croshaw and Acosta weren’t the skilled masters of their art that the Frenchman and Englishman were and there was much rejoicing when the two returned to a series of wins for Triakis and AG-Systems. AG-S won the championship by a whisker and the joke between the two used to be that the one second between the two was due to the one extra bottle of beer that Stephenson had downed on the beach. Despite the easy friendship, both teams were on edge after such a close finish and wisely, AG-S swapped Hitomi for Croshaw for the FX300 league.

The full race series on Makana proved testing for the two pilots and tensions began to rise once more, as the championship progressed harder and harder, and with Harimau beginning to nip at their heels (Auricom and Qirex were of course too busy fighting each other to mount a decent challenge) there were more than a couple of cases of stress leave for some engineers. Of course, the outcome of that championship is history now – Triakis’ illegally deemed Reverse-Inertia-Decelleration system meant the championship was gifted to AG-Systems.

Caluroso seemed to be hit hard by the ill-gotten win and his flying focus was lost for FX350 for the most part. Certainly he had a lot of detractors saying he had lost his touch by the time AG-S ended up only 4th in that championship. When FX400 came back though, he decided to strike back hard. With most perfect laps, most wins, most barrel rolls and the pilots’ championship easily sewn up, it seemed that Thierry had his mojo back and he looks to carry it on into the FX500 league.

Unlike some of the other popular pilots on the grid, Thierry is a much quieter man than his peers. He is fairly young for an AG-Pilot at only twenty-three, and has no end of admirers judging by the banners waved in the crowd sometime and the amount one woman offered for a night with the pilot. She was turned down for that offer, but the gift that Caluroso gave his fan as compensation, a data slate complete with a series of shots he did for a modelling company in Japan, were soon on the internet and getting rather a lot of popular comments, particularly the elaborate tattoo work of a panther with a rose in its’ teeth between his shoulderblades.

Second Pilot – Jason Croshaw ()
The ideal test pilot with no qualms whatsoever about saying his mind, Jason was picked for the AG-Systems role early in the team’s return to the sport after he came from the University of Auckland to the underground racing league many years prior to FX150 with the aim similar to that of his employers, of working to achieve recognition as an engineer. Unfortunately, his barbed manner and caustic criticism of other engineers, pilots, and ships whenever he flew one himself made him somewhat unpopular amongst the underground league.

Despite this, the two Japanese who began AG-Systems began asking Croshaw to fly for them again and again, claiming that the more aggressive the criticism, the better they could make their ship. Croshaw claims that he is amongst the reasons that AG-S was actually ready for FX150 to begin with, and that if every team had a development pilot such as he, they would have been untouchable.

This somewhat unhumble approach has gained Croshaw few fans amongst his fellow pilots and he is seen as something of a loner, though not thanks to a lack of conversation – he simply alienates everyone with his tone. A lot of newcomers to the sport haven’t even tried to approach the man in his trilby for fear of what he might say to them.

The fact that Jason has been a useful rock in the AG-Systems team is undeniable, but rumours have abounded that if he doesn’t perform in these leagues on track, he may be reduced to a reserve and testing pilot for the rest of his career to allow newer pilots with potentially more skill to be allowed time with the new toys. The ‘Friends in Speed’ junior team has been slow to set up, but it is coming into its’ own slowly and the two pilots there are eyeing a new race seat after this season.

Third Pilot – Chiaki Hitomi ()
Adored by the public with a fanbase most people would kill to have, Chiaki Hitomi is the only major embarrassment to AG-Systems, their black sheep. Chosen by Joy Noodles for sponsorship deals as a mediocre pilot with a huge fanbase thanks to her form and personality, AG-Systems were a little wary at taking on the untrained woman from Osaka. Every race she attends there are men and women along the sides of the track screaming their love for her and her fan page on the FX500 datacast pages has the largest number of suscribers and fans.

It is believed that she first began attending the underground tournaments prior to the FX150 as a singer and dancer, and was talked into having a go at some of the slower speed vehicles by a whooping public. When it turned out she could do a three lap race without hitting the walls, she began to do it more and more often as a curio, eventually purchasing her own ship (which to the dismay of some hardcore AG-Systems fans turned out to be an F9000-era Vector G-Tech craft) and regularly racing, to few results.

Her luck in the big leagues has been equally poor, and she claimed only one gold medal in the entire FX400 series, that being at a Venom Time Trial at her home track of Metropia. The crowd was believed to have been louder than any of the ships when she ascended the podium. But aside from that, she has been a poor pilot, especially at higher speed classes and AG-Systems are desperately looking for other popular Japanese pilots to replace her for Joy Noodles. Her only real contacts who take her seriously in the paddock are her fellow pay pilot, Mahmud Abakann of Mirage and Buster Harding of Triakis, who is believed to have a soft spot for her.